Salt for Svanetia: Pseudo-Ethnography and the Avant-Garde

• In Event: Visualizing the Caucasus: Cultural Identities in Film and Art

Abstract

Mikhail Kalatozov’s Salt for Svanetia (1933) is an anomaly in both Soviet cinema and documentary film more broadly. Largely shelved by Stalinist authorities upon its completion, the film is a highly stylized, yet ostensibly documentary portrayal of Svanetia and the Svan people—and the Soviet state’s modernization of both. This paper undertakes an analysis of Salt for Svanetia as both a modernist formal experiment and an artifact of Soviet imperialism. Paying particularly close attention to Viktor Shklovsky’s editing of the film, I will show how the film puts into action many of the key ideas of the Soviet avant-garde, including those of Shklovsky himself. In addition, I will contextualize the film more broadly, within both Soviet and international ethnographic cinema, while also connecting it to other modernist appropriations of ethnographic tropes. Through the film’s complex and uneasy treatment of its subject matter, i.e. the Svan, I hope to show how Soviet modernism both critiqued and rationalized the imperial dynamics underlying Soviet modernization.

Author

• Daniel Witkin, U of Pittsburgh